Sin City (4 page)

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Authors: Harold Robbins

BOOK: Sin City
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“He's a lucky kid to have such a pretty mom,” he said.
On impulse, she went to them and rubbed the quarter against Zack's palm.
“Give me luck, baby.”
She gave Zack a kiss on his forehead and went back to the one-armed bandit. She put the quarter in and carefully pulled down the handle, letting the tumblers engage one at a time. She stared as the tumblers spun and then came to a sudden halt, one by one. Joker, joker, joker—a two-hundred-fifty-dollar jackpot!
She let out a scream that might have been heard all the way to Vegas.
“You're my lucky baby,” she told Zack. “Lucky, that's what I'm going to call you.”
“New in town?” the dealer asked.
“Real new.”
“I can help you get a job,” he said. “I know the girls up in personnel. And a place to stay.”
Her face began to flush as he gave her a good looking over. She had already gotten her figure back and it was a good one. Who knows? Maybe this was the right guy for her.
Maybe her luck had finally changed.
MINA, TWELVE YEARS LATER
Through the dirty classroom window, I watched a dust devil swirl across the playground. The only thing that made the Mina schoolyard different from the rest of the desert was a pile of dirt that marked the pitcher's mound and a gunny sack with dirt at each base. There were only three rooms in the school: first and second grades in one, third through fifth in another, sixth, seventh, and eighth in the last one. After the eighth grade, you were bussed forty-two miles to the high school in Hawthorne. The Mina school was constructed from three army surplus quonset huts set side by side. There were no hallways, no gym, no cafeteria, no air conditioning, and only an oil stove in the back of each classroom for heat.
Mina was called high desert, nearly a mile above sea level, but you couldn't tell that by looking. Every direction out of town was flat, sagebrush and alkali flats. Mina itself was a dusty little kindling-wood town with about a hundred houses and a block of scattered businesses stretched along Highway 95. It wasn't noted for anything except a whorehouse.
The class burst into laughter as Nancy Barr broke into tears and ran out. Mrs. Wormly, she pronounced it
Vermly,
glared at us and banged her yardstick on her teacher's desk. I got the same yardstick on my butt so many times I wouldn't be surprised if my rear had inch marks on it.
“Be quiet. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
Mrs. Wormly had a round tummy, protruding rear, big, heavy breasts, thick arms and legs, puffy red cheeks, and a double chin that bounced when she got excited and talked fast. She wore flowered dresses and always had her hair pulled back into a bun. Her husband, who taught the third through fifth grades next door, was short and stumpy, with a round tummy like his wife's. He had a bald pate with a ring of red hair and so many freckles he looked like he was rusting.
“Not another word. You should be ashamed.”
She was right, but when you're twelve years old like I was, some things are funnier because you just don't know any better. Nancy Barr, who was in the eighth grade, a year ahead of me, had gone up to the front of the class to put the nine times multiplication table on the blackboard. It was Gibbs who saw the small dark stain on the back of Nancy's dress and said, “Poo-poo.” Janey Hopper called him dumb and said the stain was from Nancy's first period, but by then us boys were laughing and shouting “caw-caw.”
“The next person who laughs goes to the office.”
The “office” was a small room that had a desk, phone, bookshelves for extra books, a closet where brooms and mops were stacked, and a bathroom with a toilet and sink. All three teachers used it, although Mr. Wormly, who was also school principal, called it his office. He used to teach us older kids, but he developed hives and itched all over and the doctor in Hawthorne warned him he would have a nervous breakdown if he dealt with us anymore.
The Wormlys belonged to the Holy Roller church, which was in a quonset hut even uglier and smaller than the school's. I went there once with Gibbs and his mother and it scared the crap out of me. People yelling, clapping, and stamping their feet, a woman foaming at the mouth and mumbling some kind of gibberish they called speaking in tongues.
Mrs. Wormly gave me her “you-little-bastard” glare. She always focused on me as the school troublemaker, maybe because I saw her playing with herself. At the beginning of the school year, I had to pee real bad and the other boys were holding the boy's bathroom door closed so I couldn't get in. I ran into the office and burst into the bathroom. Mrs. Wormly was on the toilet. Her hand was down between her legs and her mouth was open, her tongue hanging out the corner of her mouth. She screamed when she saw me. I screamed, too, and ran. I never saw a woman's twat, though I knew it had hair like a man's, and I didn't know why she'd have her hand down there, but Gibbs told me his sister, who went to Hawthorne high school, jerks off by rubbing a button down there, that he had once rubbed it for her for a quarter, and that was probably what Mrs. Wormly had been doing. I ended up peeing behind the school.
Mrs. Wormly called Roberta Potter up to the board and I went back
to watching for dust devils. We liked to chase them down on our bikes and run into them. At three o'clock we ran out of the classroom and I headed for Main Street with my buddies, Gibbs and Gleason.
Mina didn't have any street named “main”; it's just what we called the line of businesses along Highway 95, the two-lane road that ran hundreds of miles down the middle of the state. There wasn't much in the way of businesses along the main drag: a motel with most of the fourteen one-room units rented out to locals, a general store, two gas stations, three bars, and two restaurants. The only institutes of significance in the town were the three-room school and the whorehouse.
An old-timer had left property to build a better school, but it was across the tracks, near the whorehouse. The choice was between the whorehouse or the new school and the locals decided on the whorehouse because it paid a good chunk of the taxes in Mineral County, which says a lot about Nevada. Mineral County covered nearly four thousand square miles, three times the size of Rhode Island, and had only about six thousand people, about a third of whom lived in Hawthorne, the county seat.
“When a girl has a period,” Gibbs told me and Gleason as we walked toward the main drag, “that means she's ready to get pregnant.”
“Nancy Barr's gonna have a baby?” Gleason asked.
Gleason was also in the seventh grade, but he was a puny, four-eyed runt with skin so pale we called him “polar bear.” Unlike Gibbs, who was an authority on sex, and me, who knew just about everything else, Gleason only knew book stuff, which meant he didn't know shit from Shinola.
“No, numb nuts, she's not pregnant. But the bleeding comes when a girl's old enough to get married and have kids. Now she's ready any time a guy sticks his boner in her.”
“Nancy's getting married?”
Gibbs lifted his eyebrows and I swatted Gleason on the back of the head. “Don't think about it, okay? Your dad say it's okay we ride on the train?” Gleason's father worked for the railroad.
“Yeah,” Gleason said. “My dad's letting us ride in the caboose.”
Gleason headed up the street to Wilson's Motor Court, where he lived with his mom and dad in a one-room cabin, and I huddled with Gibbs for a moment.
“Did you get the pamphlets?” he asked.
“I'm getting them. MaryJane said she'd have them.”
MaryJane was the madam who ran the Pink Lady, the town's whorehouse, across the highway and the rail tracks that paralleled the road. I also lived across the tracks, in a three-room shack with my mother, Betty, and her boyfriend. We hadn't discussed the pamphlets in front of Gleason because he wasn't as tough as me and Gibbs. The little yellow belly would get scared and tell his mom and spoil it for us to make some money in Hawthorne. MaryJane was giving me sheets advertising the Pink Lady because I told her a man who worked on the train was going to pass them out in Hawthorne. But Gibbs and I were going to do it.
“A hundred sheets at ten cents a sheet means ten dollars; seven for me and three for you.”
“Wow, that's cool,” Gibbs said.
Three dollars was more money than Gibbs ever had in his pocket at one time. I got the bigger cut because the Pink Lady was my personal contact.
Gibbs and I split at the corner. I headed down the main street, passing the barbershop. The old guy waved at me from where he was reading the paper in his barber chair and I waved back. I didn't like the guy much. He liked to talk about the size of a boy's dick as he cut your hair.
At the café, Betty was standing at the end of the counter in her white blouse, black skirt, and white nurse's shoes. A coffee cup with red lipstick smeared on the rim and a cigarette burning in an ashtray were in front of her.
Betty always looked the same to me, even though she was pretty old, about thirty-four. All the kids at school said she was the prettiest woman in town, though some of the mothers didn't like her. Women were jealous of her because their men liked to go into the café and talk to her.
“Hi, there, Lucky. Want a roast beef sandwich?”
“Sure.” That was my favorite—thin slices of roast beef on top of white bread and covered with brown gravy. It always came with mashed potatoes and green beans in every restaurant I ate at, and I ate in a lot of restaurants. Betty didn't do much cooking. About the only things in our icebox, which was what Betty always called a refrigerator
and I picked up the habit, were a pack of baloney, bottles of Pepsi, chocolate cupcakes, and usually a box of Cream of Wheat and milk. Plus her boyfriend's beer. We kept any foods that rats could get at, like bread and Cream of Wheat, in the icebox.
“Hey, Zack, come'er and rub my coins. I'll split the jackpot with you,” yelled a guy playing a nickel machine.
“No thank you, sir,” I yelled back. I crunched down in my seat and ate fast. This rubbing coins stuff was Betty's fault. She would tell the story about the big jackpot to anyone who'd listen. I was always being asked to rub coins and was really embarrassed because no one ever won anything.
You could tell customers liked Betty, just by the way they laughed and talked with her. And she knew how to take care of them. If eggs were runny, she told the cook to do them right. It made her good tips, but didn't make her popular with the other waitresses or the cook, who was often also the café owner. After a few months working a place, the other waitresses would start ganging up on her, get her transferred to the breakfast shift, where tips were half as much, or even get her fired.
I gobbled up everything on the plate not because I was that hungry, but from habit. Betty had been working in Mina for nearly six months, almost a record for her, but you never knew when she'd quit her job and we would climb aboard a Greyhound for another town. I'd come home from school or she'd come and get me at school and we'd throw together our things and go down to the bus depot and wait for the next bus. Betty never did get a driver's license. She told me she was too nervous to drive, but maybe it was because all the towns we lived in were small enough to get around on foot. And when we moved, we didn't take much. She always rented furnished places and all I had to throw into a small cloth bag was a pair of pants, a cut-off, two shirts, socks, underwear, my portable radio with an eight-track cassette, and my collection of Superman comic books. The only shoes I had were the black high-top Keds I wore every day. When they wore out, I'd grab enough change from her tip jar to get another pair. That didn't mean we were poor. Most people didn't have much more than us, although some of them owned their own home and car.
Besides Mina, we'd lived in Reno, Carson City, Winnemucca, Tahoe, Elko, and Virginia City. Reno and Carson City we ended up at more
than once. When we left town, there was never much left of Betty's paycheck after buying bus tickets, so there wasn't always enough to eat until Betty got working and bringing home tips. I made and lost friends quickly and never had a dog or cat. Betty was my only real friend. Kids like Gibbs and Gleason flew by like the Burma Shave road signs you see on long stretches of road.
“Gotta go,” I told Betty.
We lived across the highway and tracks just a few houses away from the Pink Lady. There was Hop, Betty, and me. Hop's real name was Paul Hopkins, but everyone called him Hop. He was tall and what they called raw boned, with big hands, shoulders, and knees on a medium-frame body. He worked at the alkali lake mine about ten miles out of town, coming home caked with dry mud. After he came in from work and showered, he'd put on his cowboy hat, pointed toe boots, pearl button shirt, and Old Spice aftershave. He claimed to be a cowboy from west Texas, but Gibbs's dad said he was an Okie from Arkie. He was okay when he didn't have a belly full of beer, but he got loud and argued with Betty when he had a few too many.
I tried to take care of Betty, but it wasn't easy. A neighbor once told me that some people don't land on both feet when they jump from the cradle. Betty was one of those who was still hopping around.
When I reached the house, I tossed my schoolbook on my couch and grabbed a soda from the icebox. The place was a wood shack with a rusty corrugated tin roof. The outside walls had black tar paper and tacked-on chicken wire to hold a coat of cement stucco but the stucco was never put on. There was one bedroom, a bathroom that stunk because the septic tank in the backyard was backing up, and a combined kitchen-living room. The furnished place came with a yellow countertop, refrigerator, a square kitchen table with chrome legs and red plastic top, four chrome chairs with red plastic pads, a stuffed sofa, which I slept on, a stuffed chair, and a bed and dresser in the bedroom. Hop owned the black-and-white TV, but its rabbit ears only brought in one station, from Reno, and it was real fuzzy.
Mrs. Wormly gave us homework to turn in on Monday morning and I got right to it. It always amazed Betty when I did that. Betty always ate the frosting on a cupcake first and let the rest dry up. I ate the cake part first and saved the frosting to savor.

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